Television technology has come a long way. Television viewers have more choices today than ever before. Viewers have more services to choose from including, terrestrial, cable, and direct-to-home satellite services. Viewers have more channels to choose from, often exceeding a hundred channels from a single service. In addition, viewers have more equipment options to choose from, including TVs, set top boxes, and satellite dishes from multiple manufacturers.
With all this welcomed choice comes two significant problems. First, it is often difficult for the average consumer to connect the equipment together correctly. For example, connecting cables between more than one satellite dish and an integrated receiver decoder (IRD) can be very confusing. Instruction manuals, hardware keys, color coding, and other similar prior art solutions are inadequate. The equipment may not necessarily be from the same manufacturer, therefore standard connection configurations must be agreed upon by the various manufacturers a priori. Even when a single manufacturer is responsible for all the components, that manufacturer typically does not know which of several options the customer is pursuing (e.g., one satellite dish connected to this year's model of IRD, or two satellites dishes connected to last year's model of IRD and an adapter box, etc.). Consequently, authors of instruction manuals try to cover all the combinations. As a result, these instruction manuals are typically large and contain an excessive amount of irrelevant information.
The second problem the viewer faces is figuring out what programs are available for viewing. Many systems now provide the viewer with an on-screen program guide that can be navigated using a remote control. However, in a system where multiple signal sources are potentially available (e.g., more than one satellite dish connection), a large number of programs listed may not actually be available for viewing if all the potential connections are not actually made.